Mention God and most people have an overall favorable reaction. And that’s because for many, God is considered an all-powerful and loving God who will one day take you to heaven. But mention the name Jesus Christ and reactions usually fall into two distinct camps. For the Christian, Jesus is a wonderful, loving, and yes all-powerful God who will indeed take us to heaven when we die. But for those who don’t know Christ, Jesus is hated because sin is loved. For those who love their sin they understand that Jesus stands in strict opposition to their sinful lifestyle and because of that they despise Him.
Some say that can’t there be a middle ground where we can respect Jesus as a great moral teacher but not God and therefore still enjoy our sin? The great British scholar and apologist, C. S. Lewis shared why this is not a valid option when he stated:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”1
You see when you realize that Christians believe that Jesus is God and that a sinful lifestyle will one day have the sinner facing the judgment of God, it becomes obvious why so many people hate Christians and their God, Jesus. When we as Christians share the full Gospel message that Jesus loves you but hates sin, no wonder many hate our message because Jesus preached a message of repentance from sin. You can’t have it both ways in that you are willing to accept that Jesus loves you but unwilling to let Jesus change you to hate sin. Loving sin is not an option for those who want Jesus to accept them and bring them to heaven when they die.
If only those who love sin could realize that when they come to Jesus and accept Him as Lord and Savior that He will transform their hearts to give them a love for Him that is so great that it will overtake their love of sin. The sweet fellowship of Jesus, and the peace and joy that comes with it, are so much more enjoyable than the few moments of pleasure that sin offers. Satan makes those who love their sin totally blind to the joy and peace that could be theirs. The tradeoff in my book is no contest. Serving Jesus has peace, joy, fellowship, and eternal life to offer while living in sin has momentary pleasures that come with guilt, shame, bondage, and eternal misery. Not only that but (Psalm 16:11) trumps momentary pleasures every time for we read: “In Your presence is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”
1 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1952), p. 52
This is a devotional response that reframes Curt’s “there is no middle ground with Christ” argument through a previous theme I was fond of: the anvil – Christ does not offer peaceful coexistence with sin, but a hard surrender that becomes the doorway to joy.
So, here and again we go, like iron wrapped in cotton:
Rejoicing on the Anvil: Because There Is No Middle Ground with Christ
There are still many people who can speak warmly about “God” in the abstract. God, to them, is a pleasant idea, a respectable heavenly force, a vague source of comfort who asks little and affirms much.
But speaking the name of Jesus Christ does something else entirely. Jesus does not remain safely abstract. He presses the conscience. He confronts the will. He forces a reckoning. Men may admire spirituality in the general sense, but Christ Himself will not let them hide in generalities. He stands before every soul not as a mascot for morality, but as Lord.
That is why there is no middle ground with Him.
This is the point so clearly made in Curt’s devotional. People may wish to honor Jesus as a noble teacher while refusing Him as God. They may want His tenderness without His authority, His mercy without His judgment, His promises without His commands. But Christ offers no such arrangement.
He does not permit Himself to be filed away among humanity’s admired sages, as if He were one more voice in the choir of ethical advice. He speaks as the Son. He calls for repentance. He claims the throne. And because He does, neutrality becomes a myth.
The sinner, of course, prefers the myth.
It is not just that fallen people are confused about Jesus. They are often offended by Him. They sense, even when they do not say it plainly, that Christ stands in opposition to what they love most: self-rule, self-justification, and the cherished pleasures of sin. Human rebellion does not merely commit to sin. It defends sin. It decorates sin. It baptizes sin in the language of personal freedom, authenticity, and self-expression.
But Jesus is merciless toward every false peace we make with darkness. He loves sinners too much to leave them unchallenged. He is too holy to make terms with the idols that are destroying them.
Here is where the image of the anvil has utility.
Christ is the anvil on which all false neutrality is shattered.
An anvil is not soft. It doesn’t negotiate with the hammer. It does not bend itself to accommodate the weakness of the metal laid upon it.
It is the fixed place where shaping happens through impact. So too with Christ. When He meets our pride, sparks fly. When He meets our excuses, the blows begin. When His truth meets our favorite lies, something must give. The flesh calls it harsh. The world calls it intolerant. But heaven calls it mercy.
Because what feels like crushing is often the beginning of freedom.
The great lie of sin is that surrender to Christ will diminish joy. Sin promises delight but pays in shame. It offers thrill but leaves rot. It produces momentary pleasure, then bondage, then emptiness, then blame. Its wages are always larger than advertised. It smiles like a host and rules like a tyrant.
Yet Christ, who strips sin of its disguises, is accused of being the thief of happiness. The accusation is absurd, but human beings have always been eager to believe absurd things when those absurdities protect their idols.
The truth is exactly the opposite.
Christ does not destroy joy. He rescues it.
The blows that fall on the anvil are not the blows of malice, but of mercy. The Lord breaks what deforms us so that He may remake what belongs to Him. Repentance feels severe only to the parts of us that need killing. The surrendered heart discovers what the rebellious heart cannot imagine: obedience is not the grave of delight, but the gateway to it. It is not found in preserving our sin, but in losing it. It is not found in negotiating with darkness, but in being delivered from it.
This is why the Christian can rejoice even under pressure.
The pressure is not proof that Christ has abandoned him. It is often proof that Christ is at work in him. Sometimes it comes from the cost of obedience, which is never theoretical for long. But in every case the Christian learns the same hard lesson: joy is not a weather report based on comfortable circumstances. Joy is obedience in motion. Joy is the settled confidence that Christ is better than what is being surrendered.
That joy is not thin, sentimental, or childish. It is forged.
It is forged where compromise dies.
It is forged where repentance becomes concrete.
It is forged where the believer stops asking how much of sin he may keep and still have Christ.
It is forged where the answer comes back, plain as iron: none of it.
There is no middle ground with Christ.
Yet notice the splendor of this severe mercy. The Lord who refuses compromise is the same Lord who offers peace, fellowship, joy, and eternal life. He is not merely taking something from us. He is giving us Himself. He tears the cup of poison from our hands not to leave us empty, but to fill us with better wine. He strips away the counterfeit so He may give the real. He wounds to heal. He exposes sin to break its power. The soul that comes to Him does not lose life. It finds it.
Rejoicing on the anvil is not madness. It is faith.
The Christian rejoices because no idol broken by the hand of God was ever worth keeping. He rejoices because the Savior who demands all is Himself worth all. And he rejoices because beyond the heat, beyond the pressure, beyond the death of false loves, there waits the fullness of joy in the presence of the Lord.
So let the believer come to the anvil. Let him come trembling if he must, bruised if he must, empty-handed if he must. Let him come ready to be broken clean of his bargains with darkness. For on that hard and holy anvil, Christ does not destroy His people. He forges them.
And those whom He forges, He teaches to rejoice.
Keep The Tip:
Christ does not meet us in the middle. He brings us to the anvil, breaks our peace with sin, and gives us the harder, cleaner joy of belonging wholly to Him.
Thanks, Mr. Blattman.